Slashers and Splatterpunks Read online

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Slashers & Splatterpunks By David Byron Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Slashers & Splatterpunks By David Byron

  © 2010 by David Byron

  Published in the United States by: NFV Films / http://nvhmag1.webs.com No part of this book may reproduced in any way, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the author/publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-557-24916-9 All interviews, images, and fiction used by permission © 2010 David Byron

  Cover design by David Byron

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  Acknowledgments: All material original to this collection excepting for :

  ‗‘The Death Of Splatter‘‘ by Lisa Morton first appeared in Dark Terrors 6 © 2002 ; Roberta Lannes interview first appeared in NVF Magazine, © March 2008

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  Contents:

  Splatterpunk 101# By John Skipp / page 7 The Interviews:

  David J. Schow / page 10

  The Splatterpunks:

  John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow / page 16 Craig Spector / page 23

  Richard Christian Matheson / page 37 Roberta Lannes / page 42

  The Outlaws:

  Joe R. Lansdale / page 51 Jack Ketchum / page 63

  They Remember the 80s: John Kenneth Muir / page 70 Chuck Parello / page 74 Doug Bradley / page 81 Simon Bamford / page 91

  Slasher Profiles:

  Pinhead / page 98

  Jason Voorhees / page 101 Freddy Krueger / page 104 Michael Myers / page 107 Leatherface / page 110 Chucky / page 113

  Norman Bates / page 115 The Tall Man / page 118

  Columns & Opinions / 120

  Film & Book reviews:

  Films:

  Hellraiser / page 149

  Friday the 13th Part 6 / page 153

  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 / page 156 Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer / 160 Halloween 2 / page 165

  Child‘s Play / page 173

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  Psycho 2 / page 176

  A Nightmare On Elm Street / page 179 Phantasm II / page 182

  Books

  Danse Macabre / Stephen King / page 187

  Off Season / Jack Ketchum / page 190

  Wet Work / Philip Nutman / page 194

  Animals / John Skipp & Craig Spector / page 198 Books Of Blood / Volume 1 / Clive Barker / page 201

  Iron Dave‘s Top 15 films of the 80s / page 207

  Greg and Chuck‘s Top Ten 80s films: Greg Lamberson and Chuck Parello share their favorites / page 211

  Fiction:

  The Death Of Splatter / Lisa Morton / page 218 1980s Films: The Definitive List

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  Slashers & Splatterpunks Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Overheard…

  SPLATTERPUNK 101 by John Skipp

  Let me try to do this as succinctly as possible. The word "splatterpunk" was a throw-away joke that David J. Schow came up with at the bar at the World Fantasy Convention in 1986.

  The reason he came up with that goofy word was this:

  Over the previous couple of years, a handful of writers had sprung up -- from pretty much out of nowhere -- with pretty radical takes on the tidy structures of "regular" horror fiction.

  None of us knew each other before then (or even knew OF each other, by and large).

  But we were all attacking the problem of "normal" horror, from some pretty wild angles. There was Clive Barker, straight out of London, with his groundbreaking BOOKS OF BLOOD.

  There was Dave Schow, writing these mind-blasting short stories from the gutters and gambles of Hollywood.

  There was Joe Lansdale, blowin' out of Texas, his wild vision really starting to take off.

  And there was the Skipp & Spector thing, stomping through the black New York City jungle night.

  We were all very different, stylistically. But we had a couple of things in common, which lumped us together in peoples' minds: 1) unflinching violence, often described more elaborately than was previously the custom;

  2) frank, usually weird, often hilarious, frequently disturbing sex;

  3) a general CULTURAL SUBVERSIVENESS, that playfully but deliberately fucked with everything that was safe and conventional and -- to our minds -- kind of chickenshit about regular, normative, conservative horror.

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  And it's THAT quality -- more than the sex, the violence, the rock 'n' roll rhythms, the cinematic imagery, etcetera, etcetera -- that distinguished that impromptu group of writers, to me.

  Less the "splat", in that sense, than the "punk". Which means punk as SOCIAL POLITICS, not just as wardrobe choice. Punk as in fun-lovin' trouble-makin' outsider-intensive dance-and-fuck-allnight critique of buttoned-down, tight-assed, only-do-it-with-thelights-off horror.

  And people in the horror scene were trying to figure out what to call this phenomenon. (Cuz that's all it was. A spontaneous eruption in the arts. Like God said, "MAKE IT WEIRDER!" and a handful of us jumped.)

  And because William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and such had just got the jaunty name "cyberpunk", Schow said, "Yeah, I guess they'll have to call us 'splatterpunks' now." And everybody laughed.

  And fifteen minutes later, it was all over the convention. And within a few months, there were articles about it everywhere from TWILIGHT ZONE Magazine to the VILLAGE VOICE to PENTHOUSE.

  Such is the power of a single stupid word, when its time has come. This, of course, is simplistic as hell. But I'm doin' it off the top of my head, so forgive me.

  If you really wanna know what the word means, read the stuff that the people were talking about then. Read, for example:

  Clive Barker

  The Books of Blood 1-3 The Damnation Game David J. Schow

  Seeing Red

  Lost Angels

  Silver Scream (editor)

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  The Kill Riff

  Joe R. Lansdale

  The Nightrunners The Drive in

  John Skipp and Craig Spector The Light at the End

  The Cleanup

  The Scream

  Book of the Dead

  This is all stuff that came out around the time period we're discussing, here. (Other examples might or might not include Ray Garton's Live Girls and S.P. Somtow's Vampire Junction.) So, in conclusion: splatterpunk is not regular horror, only grosser. (MANY grosser things have been written since, from what I hear.)

  Splatterpunk is a dopey joke name for subversive, no-holds-barred horror that rocks, and not in a regular way. If it means anything at all.

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  David J. Schow (born 1955 in Marburg, Germany) is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. His credits include films such as The Crow and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Most of Schow's work falls into the sub-genre splatterpunk, a term he is sometimes credited with coining. In the 1990's, Schow wrote a regular column for Fangoria magazine.

  In 1987 Schow's novella Pamela's Get won a Bram Stoker Award for best long fiction. David Schow has also been a frequent contributor to DVD extras content (liner notes) for horror film distributors Grindhouse Releasing/Box Office Spectaculars, notably on the upcoming North American DVD release of Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci's Cat in the Brain.

  ***

  ID: What do movies need, and what is your ideal movie? With your experience of Hollywood, could it be made? DJS: I'm not interested in the 'ideal movie' so much as I am in ideal circumstances for making a movie, which can be summed up as lots of control, and as little interference as possible.

  ID: Describe Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw
Massacre III if it had been written as a novel, and The Shaft as a movie. DJS: Leatherface as a book would be very much like the first draft script, which had a lot of extremely subtle things injected to provide a thematic continuity with Tobe Hooper's original film. Example: the rest-room at the gas station features a condom machine with 'Capricorn' rubbers, featuring a ram's head logo. That obscure enough for you?

  The Shaft as a film, to put it in high-concept-ese, would probably end up as "Die Hard with a bloodsucking worm". I probably would not write the screenplay.

  ID: You've said that The Kill Riff was written for a rock audience rather than a horror audience. What do you expect of your audience (and should there be more safety barricades?)

  DJS: Every writer of any worth writes, I think, for an imaginary group of about ten readers in his or her head -- that coterie who will understand every reference, recognize every metaphor, get each

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  joke and follow each and every layer of story at whatever depth you care to veneer the writing. Beyond that ideal, theoretical group, anybody who comprehends the writing on any level is a bonus. Extra points, if you can get an editor or a publisher to get it. Jackpot bonus if you happen to tap into something a vast audience feels expresses their feelings or fears or experiences in simpatico words. Past that, the writing has to please me, of course, or it doesn't get out into the world.

  ID: Good guys and bad guys. Any such thing?

  DJS: That's like saying, "Do you believe in a force of evil?" ID: What about censoring guys? Any personal run-ins?

  DJS: Censoring guys are bad guys. No real personal run-ins, unless you count the banal sort of half-assed, semi-conscious 'censorship' one experiences at the hands of studio development personnel, or the college-grad know-nothings who are presently overrunning New York publishing by dint of having usurped their bosses' jobs. Censorship in theory is a conceit that fascinates me; just why it is that some people try to govern what other people see or hear or think. It doesn't take any brains to go 'fuck the MPAA, man!' What's more challenging is to investigate the structure that permits organised censorship like the MPAA to exist at all. Who defines moral climate? What are morals, anyway? What is technically obscene? Besides, it's fun to document how the MPAA shoots itself in the foot more consistently than any other dictatorship in history.

  Most of my censorship encounters are variety. A story of mine was banned 'advocated necrophilia'. I didn't even depict it, let alone advocate it; I suggested it and then showed the aftermath. Idiots. At a convention I just attended in Atlanta, they conveniently 'lost' the back two-thirds of a Bob Bloch write-up I did for the program book, because in that write-up I slighted the very concept of conventions. I wrote up the fiasco as a column for Fangoria, and interpolated my Bloch piece into a much longer appreciation I'd been working on anyway, for a more important project.

  ID: You are perhaps best regarded in the field for your short stories, and have edited the anthology Silver Screen. What separates a story that works from one that doesn't?

  of the "oops/stupid" in Canada because it

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  DJS: Judging fiction is a taste-smell-touch thing, very sensory, emotional and intuitive. Which is why I'm not in a hurry to edit another anthology. I get stuck on the question: "Am I suggesting this change to improve the story, or make it more like my writing?" That's a prejudice that should not be imposed on anybody.

  ID: And splatterpunk. What are your thoughts on that subject? Sorry, I couldn‘t resist. DJS: Oh god, the s-word.

  ID: Yep, the dreaded s-word.

  DJS: Okay. Deep breaths. If fiction is food, then splatterpunk is chilli pepper. If horror is music, splatterpunk is thrashing rock and roll. Douglas Winter continually refutes those who would categorise horror by saying it's not a genre, it's an emotion, and if that is so, then splatterpunk is the downside range of the rawer emotions and perceptions.

  As it happens, the word splatterpunk was a cool marketing term for readers who instinctively distrusted advertising. It was a way of designating what did not need to be designated, because readers with a clue already knew what it was. It pissed people off, disrupted the status quo, worried a whole gang of munchkins, became the Number One gossip topic in the depths of the little pond of American horror, and made people uncomfortable, made them pay attention... all of which is what any good chunk of fiction should do. I don't believe in writing that placates, or is palliative; but playing a scale of intensity does not necessarily mandate shrieking and exploding heads every time, either.

  ID: What can we expect from you in the future? DJS: I'm tinkering -apparently forever -with Novel #3. Finishing proofreading collection #4, which is titled Look Out He's Got a Knife. Preparing to reprint my first two collections. Girding to do a really cool book under a phony name. Polishing a revised second edition of my Outer Limits book for publication this year. Waiting for several TV scripts to be shot and/or broadcast, so I can get some residuals. Playing with CD-ROM design. Revising several movie scripts. Videotaping singers and bands no one else has ever heard of. Just because of me, Excedrin stock is going through the roof.

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  ID: Finally, as TED Klein suggests, are you too smart for the horror genre?

  DJS: I think you should call up Ted and ask him if he thinks I'm too smart to answer that. ***

  Novels

  Pamela's Get (1987) - novella

  The Kill Riff (1988)

  The Shaft (1990)

  Bullets of Rain (2003)

  Rocks Breaks Scissors Cut (2003)

  Gun Work (2008)

  Short story collections

  Seeing Red (1990)

  Lost Angels (1990)

  Black Leather Required (1994)

  Crypt Orchids (1998)

  Eye (2001)

  Zombie Jam (2005)

  Havoc Swims Jaded (2006)

  Non-fiction

  The Outer Limits:The Official Companion (1986) The Outer Limits Companion (1998)

  Wild Hairs (2001)

  As editor

  Silver Scream (1988)

  The Lost Bloch Volume 1: The Devil with You (1999) The Lost Bloch Volume 2: Hell on Earth (2000) The Lost Bloch Volume 3: Crimes and Punishments (2002)

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  Elvisland (2003)

  Screenplays

  A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

  Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1989)

  Critters 3 (1991)

  Critters 4 (1991)

  The Crow (1994)

  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

  Masters of Horror—"Pick Me Up" (2006)

  Masters of Horror- "We All Scream For Ice Cream" (2007)

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  The Splatterpunks Slashers & Splatterpunks

  John Skipp { featuring Cody Goodfellow }

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  Twenty years later, some ears are still ringing, and many feathers still ruffled, from the splatterpunk revolution of the 1980's, and no one rocked harder than John Skipp. Working with partner Craig Spector, he helped do for horror what Dashiell Hammett did for crime fiction in the 1920's; he slapped it silly, and made it grow up. In controversial, bestselling books like The Scream, The Light At The End and The Bridge, the protagonists were not quaint middleAmerican cutouts, and evil wasn't always a sinister force that slithered into a picture-perfect small town. Strange new mutations of good could be found in the big cities, and evil festered, often enough, in homes just like yours.

  Time has hardly mellowed John Skipp; instead of growing old, he just keeps growing. His recent solo works––Conscience, The Long Last Call––unveiled a leaner, meaner take on the splatterpunk ethos that made him a legend, and bold flashes of street metaphysics that show how much a horror story can do, in a master's hands.

  But solo writing makes for a lonely party, so Skipp has joined up with a new partner. C
ody Goodfellow is a small-press cult phenomenon in the making, as both readers of his Lovecraftian body horror epic Radiant Dawn/Ravenous Dusk could tell you. Goodfellow's hyper-maximalist scattergun prose is an odd complement to Skipp's rapier-thin style, but the result is a compelling third voice that'll knock your dick in the dirt. Their first collaborative novel, Jake's Wake, an intimate "locked room misery" that escalates into an unimaginable new form of apocalypse, kicks off Leisure's 2009 release schedule, and they're also making it into a movie.

  And they're just getting warmed up.

  ***

  NVF Magazine Interview With…

  John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow!!

  Hey guys! How's it hanging? CG: In knots, wrapped snugly around my neck several times, thanks for asking!

  JS: Actually, it's not so much hanging as poking holes in things. LOOK OUT!

  It's a real pleasure to have you guys here! Now,I will do this the easy way, since I am kinda goofy. I will ask you both a question, and you can take turns answering!

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  Here's the first one in my long line of boring Q&A:

  How did you guys hook up, anyway?

  CG: All we ever wanted was to be had…

  JS: [groans] Oboy, here it comes…

  CG: Skipp was one of my literary heroes in my formative high

  school years, when my fontanelle finally started to close over, but

  what he and Craig Spector did transcended writing. They brought a

  ruthless volume and rhythmic pulse to their stuff that made

  everything that came before sound like your grandma wrote it.

  And I resolved to steal that thunder for myself, but successive

  effigies, golems and voodoo dolls of John Skipp failed to call down

  his mojo on my hapless solo efforts.

  I bided my time until 2004, when I "ran into" Skipp at the World